New Facebook Ad Targeting—Just in Time for the Holidays

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Facebook has introduced new features that make it easier for brands to target their ads to consumers, based on how those consumers experience the brand IRL.

It’s been rumored for a couple of months now that Facebook was seeking a way for businesses to target customers who’d visited their brick-and-mortar locations. Now those capabilities are here, and more expansive than previously imagined. For example, businesses can also target customers who made in-store purchases or who placed calls to the company’s offices or call center.

These robust offline-to-online ad targeting options are new additions to Facebook’s Custom Audience section, which has always focused on allowing businesses to take information they glean offline and apply it to online ads. For example, Custom Audiences were originally used to take the company email list and translate it into a targeted ad list—but Facebook has been steadily expanding these capabilities, as seen with this new offering.

Targeting Ads Based on Store Visits

So what do these new options allow your brand to do, exactly? Basically, you can now create a Custom Audience based on the people Facebook has tracked as having visited your brick and mortar location over the last 30 days; this location could be a store, used car lot, burger joint, you name it.

How does Facebook track this information, though? It’s relying entirely on people who have enabled Facebook to monitor their location based on the Facebook mobile app. (This is the same data Facebook uses to determine how effective ads are—for instance, how many people visit a store after seeing an ad placement.) Crucially, Facebook is only counting those consumers who physically enter your store—not people who just happen to walk by your location, etc.; Facebook is compiling these Custom Audiences only from individuals who it has a “high confidence” have visited your store.

One caveat to all of this: Right now, these Custom Audience functions are only available to businesses that operate 10 locations or more. Smaller or single-site companies are currently not eligible for these features, though that could change.

More Options for Advanced Targeting

There’s more that businesses can do with Facebook’s Custom Audience function, too. For example, companies can take advantage of the Offline Conversions API, a Facebook plug-in that’s integrated with the company’s call system or point of sale software. This allows companies to sync in-store conversions with their Facebook campaign.

In short, there are any number of ways to use offline data to make your ad targeting more effective—and that’s timely: With the holiday shopping season approaching, brands will want to do everything they can to place ads that will be seen by their actual customers, or, conversely, to use holiday foot traffic as a chance to grow their online audience.

All of this is doable, but it requires both a serious investment in Facebook Ads, as well as a comprehensive strategy. And there’s no time like now to implement one. EverythingOnline would love to provide our guidance; we offer a no-fuss, no-fluff approach to Facebook Ads, leaning heavily on real-world data to provide you with fast, efficient results.